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quickOnTheUptake writes in to update the story of foul play in Apple's App Store, which we talked over on Sunday. The Next Web, which broke the story, now provides evidence of rampant App Farms used for theft in the store. Here is a summary of the problems TNW has seen, which includes large-scale break-ins of the App Store accounts of users worldwide. Apple has responded to the initial reports, has disabled the account of the initially fingered rogue developer, and has called on those whose accounts were misused to change their password and credit card. Both TNW and Engadget, at least, believe the problems go far deeper than Apple is admitting.

What happened there?They won't allow flash or 'widgety' apps yet allow apps that do noting but get the developer points.A developer with almost 5,000 apps?So much for that 200,000 apps in the apple store.... perhaps half are fake?

Apple did not catch him, the users did... when they lost their money and had no choice but to go to their banks to get it back.Perhaps they should not approve apps that have no purpose?Can a developer REALLY put together almost 5,000 apps?That is to the point of being obvious as hell that your gaming the system, yet was allowed to.

I'm not complaining about slashdot reporting stories... I'm saying that any Apple story - whether it be positive or negative - turns into people screaming their hatred for the company like it were a picture of Emmanuel Goldstein. In the ten years I've been visiting the site, I've seen this only happen to two companies: Microsoft and SCO.

My point: Fuck apple... I don't care about their rep... it's this blind parroting that makes for a shitty discussion. If I wanted that... I'd head over to Digg.

Goldstein was the purported author of a book that explains the way the oligarchy controlled the masses. Hmm, that could be analagous to DRM and closed platforms, but I'm still not really seeing it, since that makes Apple Big Brother and not Goldstein, although admittedly in the book, Goldstein is a fabrication of Big Brother, so maybe in a twisted way it works.

Finally, Goldstein supposedly had a network of people undermining the ruling party. The party spread this information to create fear in the populace. I haven't seen Apple saying Microsoft or Google is infiltrating their customers and undermining them from within.

Nope. All I can figure is that Apple is doing a bad job with the app store and you suck at analogies. But better luck next time.

Eh, the system didn't work. Last night on TV, some dude on the "tech spot" for the local news said that up to $10,000 were spent from a single account!

The whole bit was REALLY lame. They explained it like this:

There's a warehouse, and 1 dude in there shouting "books, books" with no one buying because they can't hear his voice from the many other. So then, somehow he rigs it (hacks) so that he goes into peoples accounts and buys his own book. Then apple is like, o`rly? Why is this lowly book #1 beating out ze twinkle series? And so they noticed and are like arrrrg! We've been piz0wn0red, right And they recall the app and remove it from the store.

I think that, regardless of how bad they portrayed what happened, the damage is done. All the arguments the smug iPhonies have made of "well macs don't get viruses...(implying security)" "it's good that there is so much control because it makes it safer..." are now??? But, thankfully for apple, many of their fans will just turn their heads and look the other way.

So I guess only time will tell but I'm guessing those with that white veil over their eyes won't let this problem affect them. As one windows to mac user said "I just got tired of windows... and macs just work!"

More like O'Brien [wikipedia.org]. At first glance, he's an anti-establishment agent, determined to break down the oppressive system. But once he lures you in, you'll experience psychological pressure like never before and you will be assimilated!

You can bet a dollar to a doughnut that they have some clever verbiage buried deep down in the EULA that removes their responsibility in some meaningful way.

BTW, who the hell is still visiting the crApp Store anyway? I froze my iTouch at 2.2.1 because I refuse to pay another $10 for the elusive Copy/Paste bug they failed to ship, or fix, in my rev. I downloaded all the free games, fart apps, tip computers, and two useful apps back in 2008 and never went back. Not all that impressed with the garden. In fact, it mostly sucks ass. Enjoy at your own peril!

So a total of 48 apps out of 200,000+ were bad 'Apples', and suddenly the entire App store is a 'dismal failure'

Still trying to figure out who you are quoting with the dismal failure bit. Or are you setting up a strawman, ready for the heroic striking down?

However there are countless terrible, terrible apps in the App Store. There are countless terrible, terrible apps in the Android market. The difference is that one of these claims that they curate their market (comparing themselves to a fine museum) -- their founder openly saying that user privacy is why they curate their market -- and the other makes no such notion (but instead protects privacy by forcing apps to declare rights requests that users need to allow). I'll let you guess which is which.

So.. I do see some value in all this as a metric on Apple's place in the hearts of my fellow nerds

I've always found it strange how the general opinions on slashdot has almost zero correlation to those of the geeks i know in real life; everyone I know who owns an apple product seems to be in love with it. more and more people i know seem to be switching to macbook pros. if I were to believe slashdot, all the geeks i know should apparently own androids and run ubuntu, and make endless rants about how 'the man' is keeping apple users from doing what they want with their devices.

You seem to be confused, and should probably re-read the article. These apps are not scams, they are actually simple book apps, in and of themselves, unremarkable.

Did I say otherwise somewhere? If so, I apologize, but I'm quite sure I'm made no insinuation that these were any sort of exploit.

Instead they were just garbage fillers, used as a target for an exploit (the mechanism of which we have no idea of, though curiously lots of people are trotting out the Apple-can't-be-to-blamed simple passoard canards et al...which is curious because on any modern system you simply can't do dictionary attacks. Anyways...). I replied to a guy who made some argument for Apple's curation claims, and my point is simply that these "unremarkable book apps" have been widely noted as being trash (which is why it earned attention -- no one would seriously buy it). Curation indeed.